Guest JH, it is clear you aren't going to let your ideological loyalties get in the way of the facts. I didn't deny or argue that Republicans were dissed. I said their being dissed by a handful of impatient partisan jerks was insignificant. BIG difference.

Now then, just where did I say Wellstone enjoyed a 20 point lead? I said he enjoyed a 10 point lead in the final polls prior to his death, and by the time he died, some pundits were predicting it had opened up even further, and suggested he might win the election by as many as 20 points. That isn't even remotely close to saying that Wellstone was 20 points ahead when he died.

Perhaps your mathematical ability is as bad as your read comprehension?

The final polls just prior to Wellstone's death, showed he was 9-10 points depending upon the poll) ahead of Coleman. Here are the results of the final MSNBC poll prior to his death:

Final MSNBC poll prior to Wellstone's death

According to the final Minneapolis Star Tribune poll just prior to the election (and after the memorial), it looked like this:

"The poll, conducted Wednesday through Friday, shows Mondale at 46 percent and Coleman at 41 percent, but that falls within the margins of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points."

The number of undecided, according to the Strib poll, was 9%. It was clear then that the memorial had caused Coleman to gain in the polls, and that Mondale was sinking. Despite that final poll, everyone on the ground already knew that the post-memorial Democrat bashing had won the day, because it was clear the momentum was with Coleman.

The article I quote from is full of anecdotal evidence that the swing voters (the undecided 9-10% depending on the poll) were going to go against Mondale because they were angry at Democrats for the Rick Kahn speech (very few Minnesotans cared about the booing, unless they were hardcore Republicans). There was just too much emotion and volatility the weekend before the election for the polls to accurately pick up on all that was going on with the electorate. Hence, the Coleman victory of 2 points in a squeaker, where he gained 12 points in the final election results from the first Mondale/Coleman poll taken just before the memorial.

Prior to the Wellstone memorial, but after it was publicly known that Mondale was going to run, the numbers were Mondale 47% and Coleman 39%, which was virtually unchanged from the final Wellstone/Coleman poll prior to Wellstone's death.

I can post a link to the article if you would like "proof" that what I'm saying is accurate.

Yet amazingly, the weekend after the memorial, the Strib (along with all the other local media) astonishingly claimed this:

"Both campaigns...marked the end of a four-day period in which every campaign in the state went dark after Wellstone's death."

What the Strib doesn't say is what is most telling of all. Every candidate in Minnesota quit campaigning Friday afternoon, as soon as word of Wellstone's death was released. All of them except Coleman, that is. Coleman kept doing tv & radio interviews after Wellstone's death was announced, rather than just holing up and issuing a press release, which is what the circumstances dictated, and was in fact what nearly every candidate in the state did.

So right after the local news announced the death of Wellstone on the Friday evening of the crash, there was Norm Coleman and his beautiful Hollywood B actress trophy wife, holding an "informal, impromptu" (my ass) press conference in front of their house, talking about how tragic it all was. That night on the local political news show, the Republican attack dog Sarah Janacek, kept lamenting how awful it was for Norm Coleman, who now had to run against the Wellstone sympathy instead of the Wellstone record, and how terrible it was going to be because of course Norm would almost certainly lose the race.

The entire day after Wellstone's death, Coleman did radio interviews and phone interviews with the print media. He held another "informal and impromptu" press conference in the parking lot of a the local TV station that put him on local TV and did the national network feed, so he could appear on all the national networks the Sunday (two days) after Wellstone's death. Republican attack dog Sarah Janacek also held an intensely eerie news conference in the parking lot outside an empty Coleman campaign headquarters on Sunday morning (to prove, of course, that Norm wasn't campaigning, even though his face was on every local and national news station from across town at KSTP-TV).

On Monday, three days after Wellstone's death and the day before the Wellstone memorial, Coleman was back making staged "informal and impromptu" non-campaigning media appearances again, all over in the local, but mostly national media, talking again about how he was still so upset over the death of his honorable opponent, and how decent a man Walter Mondale was, but he wouldn't comment on the DFL party's choice to replace Senator Wellstone who was, of course, irreplaceable. Coleman's campaigning was so blatantly obscene, even the former Republican governor Arne Carlson (who was still deluding himself that he was still the Republican party's leader, despite being out of office for two years) demanded he stop campaigning and go home, because his behavior was "unseemly and reflected badly on all Republicans".

But of course, the local and national media never picked up on former governor's smackdown of Coleman either. That's because the media appearances were all being orchestrated by the Rove/Cheney machine, who was giving the marching orders to the Coleman campaign via Sarah Janacek. Besides, it was much better that the local media keep up the charade that Coleman's campaign had gone dark like the others "out of respect to the families", because if they didn't, the public might notice that Rick Kahn was distraught with grief, and NOT campaigning for Mondale, when he went off on his bizarre rambling "If you love Paul Wellstone..." rant which he aimed at the Republican friends of Paul's who were in the audience (whom he REALLY bizarrely called on by name), like the aforementioned Jim Ramstand.

The Wellstone sons did not make a single public appearance or comment to the media until months after their family's death. Their speeches at the memorial were it, so it absolutely couldn't be argued that they were campaigning. And Mondale had only appeared on tv by default, when he was caught going into Wellstone HQ on Friday afternoon after the crash. He wasn't seen or heard from until the memorial (he made no media appearance or comment, unlike Coleman, at the memorial).

Of course, Coleman just HAD to appear at the memorial service, and despite former Governor Carlson's admonishment to him the previous day to quit campaigning, Coleman chose to make more comments and more media appearances for the cameras, to all the assembled national and local media about how it wouldn't be decent to comment on the memorial, and that he would let others decide whether Rick Kahn's speech was appropriate or not when he began his campaign the following morning. It was a time for healing, he said, looking somber and senatorial right into the national tv cameras.

For a man who wasn't campaigning, he sure as shit got a whole lot of campaign face time in the media while his campaign was supposedly dark. His somber, senatorial manner was seductive. Even I bought into it until Republican Governor Carlson told him to shut the fuck the up and stop campaigning on Monday.

Of course, a year and a half later, we know the Rove/Cheney strategy was for Coleman to keep making media appearances in which he appeared somber, subdued, and to be reaching out to grieving Minnesotans, while the national (and a few of the most notorious local) Republican attack dogs ripped the Wellstone family and campaign to shreds in the national and local media for being "political". The game plan was to complain that all the media coverage being given to the Wellstone story was unfair to the Coleman campaign. That the media was giving all these high powered Democrats coming in to town to talk turkey with Walter Mondale and the local DFL party apparatchiks, so much media time (which they really didn't get, BTW), that it was the equivalent of the dead Wellstone still campaigning.

So Coleman's media appearances just had to be done, Republicans claimed, because otherwise it wouldn't be fair to the Republicans. After all, fairness had so much to do with the Democrats losing their incumbent on the eve of the election, and the national media frenzy over the race being orchestrated behind the scenes by the White House. They kept pumping up the volume, saying it was the race that would decide which party would hold the majority in the senate, control the Congress, blah blah blah. The truth was, there were (depending on whose count you used) roughly 10 Senate races that determined that, not just one.   Including the despicable job they did on Max Cleland.

It is true the Democratic heavy weights were coming in to the state to meet the Wellstone family amd campaign, and to woo Mondale out of retirement (Mondale and Wellstone were personal friends, and the sons really wanted Mondale to take their father's place, even though Mondale hesitated to accept at first). Because local news media were covering the Kennedy celebrity train coming to town, Coleman and his White House puppeteers decided they couldn't let "Wellstone surrogates" like Kennedy and neighboring South Dakota senator Tom Daschle (another good friend of Wellstone's, who was already in the Twin Cities at the time of the crash to attend a family wedding on Saturday night), get media time without Coleman getting media time to counter the sympathy the Wellstone family and campaign was getting.

So Coleman cynically and manipulatively never quit campaigning, despite his pledge to do so. And when the local media kept repeating the mantra that no one was campaigning, when Coleman clearly was doing just that, the whole thing had an air of Coleman the emperor appearing without clothes to his media throngs who were cheering him on for looking appropriately somber and comforting to the unwashed masses.

Never mind that Kennedy, Dashcle, and Mondale couldn't escape the wall of journalists outside the campaign headquarters on Friday (the day of the crash) even if they'd wanted to, when they went to offer their condolences, and sit with and reassure the campaign staff while the Wellstone sons and the campaign director went to Eveleth to visit the crash site (something relatives often choose to do after a crash). But that was the only time Mondale appeared publicly until the memorial itself.

Like I said, the cynical exploitation of the Wellstone deaths still stuns me. I don't know if I'll ever get over it. We'll see if Coleman can get re-elected. All he appears to do, according to Minnesota Republicans and Democrats alike, is sit in Big Daddy Cheney's chair when he is gone from the Senate (and in a secure, undisclosed location where he can pull the puppet strings without any interference from things like his duties as vice president).